Wait– A blogging platform? Isn’t WordPress enough? Well… to be honest, it’s too much. Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress. Chances are I’m going to continue using it. But WordPress is much more than a blogging tool. By now, it’s become a full-blown CMS you can build all sorts of sites with.

For somebody who just wants a simple blog… It’s a little bit overkill. I think it’s good that there is a little “competition”, and I also think that starting from scratch once in a while is not a bad idea.

So, I’ve installed my copy of Ghost on my mac and played with it a bit. It’s very bare-bones right now and a little geeky — for example, is a blogging platform with no visual editor really viable? — but I think it looks very promising and I’m looking forward to the hosted version being open to the public.

I pride myself in being one of these “early generation” people, not a “me too”. This year the blog you’re reading will celebrate its 9th birthday, which means that although I’m not the oldest dinosaur out there, I was already blogging when many who are now considered respected old-timers wrote their first post. I’ve been earning money in the field of what we now call social media since early 2005 — and this is Europe, little Switzerland, not the US of Silicon Valley. And without wanting to blame all my failures on being too innovative, I like to think that at least some of them have to do with trying to do things too soon, before the market was ready for them.

The facts above are not just to toot my own horn (a little, I’ll admit) but to drive in the point that I have a very different profile from people who discovered social media, noted that it was (or was going to be) hot, and decided to jump in and make money out of it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… I think. I’m somebody who has always been driven more by my interest in things than by “earning money” — my somewhat mediocre business skills (monetizing, marketing, sales). What “title” can I find to differentiate myself from all the other people who are now in the field?

When I was reading Dan’s article, I kept thinking “yes, but what if I really am a social media expert?” I’m not a “had a blog for 18 months” or “I know what Twitter is” kind of expert. And I’m also not somebody who sticks to one kind of activity or domain of expertise (e.g. “teenagers and the net” or “blogging for internal communications”).

I’m aware that part of my ongoing struggle to define myself for others has to do with my internal struggle to figure out what it is exactly that I do, want to do, can get paid to do. I know what I have been paid to do during the last three years. I have more insight into what I don’t like doing and others want me to do, and am learning to say no. “What I do well” is a bigger problem, because part of me keeps thinking that I suck at more or less everything I do, and though I know it’s not true, it makes self-assessment tricky.

I also think I have a bit of a “generalist” profile: I’m good at a lot of things, but probably, for each thing that I do, you can find somebody who is a bigger “expert” — but who will have a more limited field of expertise. I view myself as a kind of “generalist specialist”, or “generalist expert” in my field.

Many years ago, I wrote a rant in French about so-called “blogging specialists”. (For the sake of the discussion here, let’s consider that specialist = expert.) At the time, I was concerned about the need of the press to be able to quote “specialists”, and they were labeling bloggers “specialists” left, right, and centre, me included. At the time, I felt anything like a specialist, and resented the misattribution.

I guess the same thing bugs me today. People labeling themselves “experts” when, in all honesty, they’re not that much of an expert (see reason #1 in Dan’s article). It’s easy to be somebody else’s expert when you know more than them: au royaume des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois. I see it a lot. It annoys me for two reasons: first, there is sometimes a certain amount of dishonesty or deception (conscious or not) involved; second, if everybody is an expert (reason #6), how do you distinguish between the experts? How do I label myself to make it clear that I am not the same breed as the buzzing crowd of “me too” web2.0 or social media “experts”?

The pioneers of new media are still successful today, but they don’t even brand themselves as “social media experts.” Think about experts such as David Meerman Scott, Paul Gillan, Chris Brogan, Charlene Li, Steve Rubel, and Robert Scoble. David is an author who has successfully blended social media with PR and marketing before everyone else. Chris Brogan focuses more on social media’s impact on community building and he’s been blogging religiously before the medium became mainstream. Don’t try and brand yourself as one of them because you’ll fail trying.

I guess this works if you really have an area of specialisation in social media, but that’s just not the type of personality I am. I see it in other areas too, take judo, for example: most judo practitioners have one “special”, a move that stands out — I have at least 3 that could be my “special”; how about studies? I spent my career switching between arts and science.

So when it comes to my work, what am I good at? I’m good at a lot of things:

But in none of these areas am I “the most extraordinary person out there”. My strength is that I do all these things, and pretty well too — but there is nothing I can put forward to say “I’m the ultimate expert on X”.

How do I market myself? What do I call myself, if I can’t call myself a social media expert?

Like each time I upgrade WordPress, I find myself facing the sprawling mess that my site has become, and the umpteen hacks made to template and plugins to get things working roughly how I want them.

So I think: time to clean up! Get rid of K2! re-write plugins, so they insert fun things in my themes without me having to put them in by hand all the time!

And then it all goes down the drain, because I try one theme, and another, and another, and none really fits, and I don’t want to **yet again** go through the half-dozen addition of template tags to make my blog bilingual and shiny. But I do want it bilingual and shiny, don’t get me wrong.

I want to use sandbox. I’d like to adapt my Basic Bilingual plugin so that it injects lang="fr" and lang="en" where necessary. I want a clean layout, and I still like my [blue header image of Ouchy](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/83450335/) (pronounce “ooshee”, please).

I have tons of things in the sidebar, and they need to be laid out so they don’t look too cluttered (a challenge, yes, I know).

I want my tag pages to link to technorati, maybe show my flickr photos with the same tag, or my del.icio.us links.

I want [ajax-ification](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/1306106896/) so that I can correct spelling mistakes and add/remove tags without going to the admin interface ([Inline Tag Thing](http://www.neato.co.nz/wordpress-things/inline-tag-thing/) looks promising, but I’m not sure I like the interface).

Sigh.

Maybe I should just start a CTTS design contest. Give out prizes. Something like that.

Or stop wanting to push my blogging tool where it isn’t yet? I don’t want to give up.

**Update:** for the curious, the temporary design is [Diurnal](http://www.sndbx.org/results/designs/diurnal/), a sandbox skin. The colours change with the time of day — pretty neat in my opinion.

In the last ten days I’ve started planning, thinking, and talking about [my new company](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/11/13/im-starting-a-company/). One of the things I’m struggling with at the moment (besides finding a name which isn’t already taken, isn’t too lame, and won’t get me sued) is how to consider others that are in the field I want to step into (I haven’t told you yet, have I?)

Very obviously, they are competition. My company is going to be doing stuff similar to theirs. But I don’t have the feeling it’s really clear-cut. I mean, look at the “social media consulting” business. Amongst my acquaintances and friends, there are many people who do similar things to me. But they feel more like colleagues than competition.

Is it simply because our skills overlap imperfectly, and our markets are geographically or economically separated?

As I understand it, to be competition, two companies (or people) need to be competing for the same clients/users, and this competition has to be exclusive. By that, I mean that if the client/user decides to go with company A, company B is going to lose his business. I guess this is pretty obvious.

So this is what I’m wondering about. I’m preparing to enter a market which is not totally new. There are already people/companies doing what I want to do. But I’m going to do it in a unique way — mine. Does that still mean the others are “competition”? and in that case — for those of these others who are friends or contacts — does that mean that I will be perceived as a threat, and that any “network benefits” I would have had from those people is to be considered lost? Is it going to have a negative impact on these relationships?

This seems pretty tough. (Maybe it’s just the business world, and I need to toughen up, but I don’t like this side of it, if it is.)

I’m not here to put others out of business. I want to do things better, appeal to a different audience, or “increase the consumption” (horribly way to phrase things, but I don’t have anything better on the tip of my tongue without being more specific) of the current “audience”.

I’m aware I might be coming across as terribly naive to all of you seasoned entrepreneurs and business people out there. But I’d like to believe it’s possible to “play nice” with “competition” — maybe not to the extent that they become partners, but at least something resembling a relationship between colleagues. A relationship where help can be given, contacts shared, advice and lessons learned dispensed. Even if I wouldn’t go so far as to expect partnership.

What about partners, then? Can they be involved with the competition? Could they have interests in one’s competition? (That sound like a bad idea, said like that.) Conflicts of interests aren’t good, that’s certain — but can we really be free of them?

I know that without the specifics this may seem a little abstract, but I’d really love to hear what you all think about this.